At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

Faux Conservatives, the Script, and the Death of the Conservative Movement

The conservative movement is dying, if it isn’t already dead. But neither “the left” nor some rightist doctrine is the culprit. Rather, the movement is reaching the point of extinction because those of whom it is comprised, and its spokespersons particularly, have all but killed it.

And they’ve killed it by abandoning conservatism in favor of the ideology of their opponents.

The self-described conservative who listens routinely to talk radio and watches Fox News will no doubt have trouble making heads or tails of my diagnosis. Yet it is high time that he grasp that he has been had.

Today’s “conservative” spokespersons are faux conservatives. What amounts to the same thing, they are leftists of varying degrees.

The political clashes that we witness today are actually internecine conflicts between leftist factions. In other words, the not so grand stage of Broadway on the Potomac serves as the venue in which leftist Democrats and leftist Republicans enact their co-authored script—a script from which the bane-stream media in both of its conventional leftist and faux conservative guises then faithfully reads.

As for those actors who dare to deviate from the Script, who dare to defy the role into which they’ve been cast, the treatment they can expect is merciless. One of two things is guaranteed to happen. Upon having the full power of the bane-stream media brought down upon their heads, they either will be forced to grovel for forgiveness, or else they will be banished from the theatre all together. Sometimes, in fact, both fates await the person who dares to question the narrative.

Anyone in doubt about the existence of the Script need only consider the following facts.

The members of America’s conservative party, the GOP, claim to oppose abortion. Yet while they talk the talk, when have they ever walked the walk? Abortion remains as available today as it has ever been, and roughly the same number of people this year as every other year for the last several decades will avail themselves of it. Abortion became a constitutional right under a Republican president, Richard Nixon, and one of the conservative movement’s gods, Ronald Reagan, legalized it in California while governor there.

It is even worse than this, though, for when election time comes around and angry members of the base of the conservative movement threaten to abstain from voting because of a candidate’s checkered record on abortion, they are castigated by the movement’s (self-appointed) spokespersons for being “one issue” voters.

“Affirmative action” is a race and gender-based policy of discrimination aimed at privileging non-whites and women over white men. Conservatives claim to oppose all discrimination, regardless of who it is directed against. However, as in the case of abortion, while they pay lip service to equality under the law, they have done nothing to fight for it on this front.

In fact, they don’t even talk all that much about “affirmative action” anymore. If anything, faux conservatives have reinforced the politically correct Script by accusing their opponents of the very same sins—“racism,” “sexism,” etc.—of which they are routinely accused: Sarah Palin’s and Michele Bachmann’s critics, say, are “sexist,” while Herman Cain’s and Michael Steele’s are “racist.”

Immigration is but another case in point. The overwhelming majority of contemporary immigrants are under-skilled Third World Hispanics who, as Jay Leno recently quipped, are nothing more or less than “undocumented Democrats”—lovers of, not Big Government, but Gargantuan Government. But rather than fight like hell to reverse course here, faux conservative Republicans urge for their “pathway to citizenship”—translation: amnesty.

Of course, there is always insistence that “the border be controlled first.” But, mind you, this is coming from the very same faux conservatives who are otherwise constantly sounding the alarm against either the inability or the unwillingness of government to fulfill its constitutional duties.

There is no issue that puts the lie to the faux conservative’s commitment to smaller government than that of foreign policy. There is no war that he isn’t willing to wage in order to promote “human rights” and “Democracy” (traditionally, leftist buzzwords). Any proposed cut to defense spending, however infinitesimal, he treats as a move to “decimate” our military. Anyone who proposes these cuts he regards as “weak” on national defense. But Big Military is Big Government. You can’t have one without the other.

The federal government has continued to grow, continued to divest itself of its federal character, regardless of whether the Democratic left or the Republican left has presided over it. To repeat, whether it is Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, “liberal’ and “conservative” presidents alike have relegated whatever was left of the Founders’ America to the dustbin of history. From the perspective of, say, Thomas Jefferson, Reagan no less than Obama would appear as a partisan of the fundamental transformation of the country.

It is high time for the devotees of talk radio, Fox News, and other bane-stream media outlets of the faux conservative variety to realize that their movement, if it ever existed, was killed a long time ago by poseurs and opportunists who prefer the fame and the fortunes that “respectability” brings over an intellectual and moral tradition that the Script excludes.

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At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

by Jack Kerwick

Regardless of one's views on religion, there is no escaping the fact that Western civilization is unintelligible in the absence of it -- of Christianity specifically. Indeed, even the secular ideologies of our generation derive their identity from the Christianity to which they are opposed. Culture and religion intersect in numerous ways. Through this blog, I explore the intricate relationship between them.